People treat facts as relevant more when the facts tend to support their opinions. When the facts are against their opinions, they don't necessarily deny the facts, but they say the facts are less relevant or insignificant. This is ofcourse because believing things that make you feel comfortable, takes a priority. And I think that should not be the case if one is after truth.

People treat facts as relevant more when the facts tend to support their opinions. When the facts are against their opinions, they don't necessarily deny the facts, but they say the facts are less relevant or insignificant. This is ofcourse because believing things that make you feel comfortable, takes a priority. And I think that should not be the case if one is after truth.

1over137 wrote:You may have noticed that the g&s was not available today.Rich solved it already.We were illegitimately shutdown.

Illegitimately shut down by who, and for what reason?

Maybe this is part of some sort of thought police on the internet monitoring for hate speech... not sure of this but makes you wonder... in light of the recent developments in the USA... see links below

Hacker culture is rather varied. If anything, I figure that hackers like a challenge and will work on ways to subvert that project mentioned in the links above.

Regarding hacker culture, there's multiple variants. There's the newbies ("script kiddies") who have no understanding of programming and use pre-programmed apps for mischief (they like to brag on facebook and twitter), there's the more creative pranksters who don't brag publicly, there's the vigilante crowd, then there's the people who illegally access information (which most often comes in two varieties: espionage, or freedom of information activists.) Then there's the sort that just crave personal challenges, and then there's the certified ethical hackers that companies hire for helping find loopholes or exploits in security software and the like, and also to function as consultants in some cases.

As for what happened to this site, I it may well have simply been a juvenile prank from some amateur.

(I'm not really an expert on hacking in and of itself, though.).

As for that webcrawling bot that is getting publicly funded, well, it's an open source project, meaning that anyone can take a peak "under the hood" (or rather, at the source code) and submit updates, revisions, and make derivatives.

The implications on how such a program can be used are indeed concerning. Ironically, the very thing it claims it will go against is the very purpose it can be used for. And would not this sort of program already exist and have been developed years ago by intelligence and espionage agencies? It seems that it's the sort of tool they'd have already, considering how useful it'd be. (And it'd probably just be another variant on already-existing search engine software anyway.)Guess that said agencies don't like sharing their toys with other branches of government?